Knight's Reading List III: March 2007

In March 2007 I finished reading the following books:

fx-9750G Plus User’s Guide. xxv + 455 pages.
A Book of Middle Eastern Food, by Claudia Roden. (1968, 1972), 453 + xiv pages, including Index.
Peter Wells, The Complete Semi-Slav. (1994) 304 pages.
The Mauritius Command, by Patrick O’Brian. (1977) 348 pages.
Eric Flint and David Drake, The Dance of Time. (2006) 468 pages.
No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. (2005) 309 pages.
I also listened to the audiobook, The Majesty of the Law, by Sandra Day O’Connor.

I think we can skip lightly over the user's guide to a graphing calculator I bought myself, although it was part of my continuing effort to master some of the higher mathematics. There will be more on that later. I'm also going to ignore The Majesty of the Law, although it was both enjoyable and informative. The Supreme Court is a long-time interest of mine, and there were other books on that subject which came over my desk this year.

The Mauritius Command is another good, workmanlike novel by Patrick O'Brian, and is based upon an actual incident (or series of incidents) on and about the island of Mauritius. Mauritius is, in case you didn't know, in the Indian Ocean, and was the home of the late lamented flightless bird, the dodo. O'Brian has quite a knack for finding obscure theaters of war during the long struggle between England and France in the early 19th century, and placing his characters in them to display their virtues, as well as their faults, in the course of solving the puzzles set for them. The Mauritius Command, for those of you interested in combined-arms operations, illustrates both how difficult it could be to obtain effective cooperation between the naval and the military forces of the some country, and how helpless an enemy could be in the face of such cooperation. These seem to be lessons that need to be learned anew by every military command, in the circumstances of each new war.

One example of good cooperation is that between Grant's army and the Union's naval forces on the Mississippi, during the Vicksburg campaign. If one compares the imperfect state of cooperations during the operations around Fort Donelson and Fort Henry, earlier in the war, to the finely coordinated actions in 1863, one can see how much effort and intelligence is needed to obtain a result, the need for which seems self-evident.

David Drake wrote the outline for The Dance of Time, and Eric Flint then put flesh on that skeleton. This has been a good system for the two writers and their publisher, but, in my opinion, The Dance of Time shows the Belisarius series running out of steam. The trajectories of the actors are determined to a large degree by what occurred in earlier books in the series, rather than by what is between the covers of this book. These books, by the way, also illustrate the successful use of combined arms, but I rather think it comes off a little too effortlessly. I could, of course, be wrong, and I'd have to re-read some of the earlier works in the series to validate my thinking. I might, at least, mention the rather interesting scene early in Drake's solo novel (in his Lord of the Isles series) Servant of the Dragon, in which some of the difficulties of training up a military force are indicated when two oared ships attempt a passing maneuver, and some of the rowers don't get their oars out of harm's way quickly enough.

Which brings me to the great work of this month. I should mention that I have the habit, for good or ill, of simultaneous (or, more precisely, contemporaneous) reading of several books at once. I'll read a chapter in one, and then two chapters in another, and then a chunk of a third, so the timelines of my books all overlap. It is, therefore, indicative of the grip established by Cormac McCarthy on this reader, that I read No Country for Old Men in three days, beginning on March 19 and ending on March 21, 2007. Cliches such as "page-turner," "gripping," "couldn't put it down," come to mind, and are all inadequate to express McCarthy's accomplishment here. The story here is that of a man just a little too stupid to pass up good fortune, and the consequences - the terrible consequences - of his ill-considered action.

In brief, in West Texas in 1980, a drug deal has gone wrong, and the buyers and sellers have managed to kill one another to, it appears, the last man. A trailer-park cowboy comes upon this scene and finds bags of money without apparent owners. He takes some, and, I think, the real hook in this story is that so would you. At least, it is quite believable that, under these circumstances, any of us might say "What the Hell?" and make off with a stash of "found money." From that point on, this becomes a story of violent responses to violent stimuli, all the more compelling because it all follows so naturally from the original situation. Of course, Adam and Eve are driven from the Garden of Eden; they took the apple, didn't they?

I heard a review of the movie the Coen brothers have made from this book on NPR a few days ago. The reviewer asserted that the movie was "nine-tenths of a masterpiece." The book is closer than that.

By the way, in March of 2006 my friend Al Vogel and I went down through New Mexico to the Big Bend country of West Texas. This has been Cormac McCarthy's homeland since Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses. The stark, dry, deadly landscape is not only a fine setting for the grim story of No Country for Old Men, it goes a long way to explain the characters McCarthy discovers there.